Rand Paul jumps on the Romney corporate train

posted by Lana N. | 3pt
August 12, 2011

What is it with these people? Are they programmed at some secret corporate retreat? Rand Paul doubled down on Mitt Romney's "corporations are people" talk yesterday, calling us all corporations and stating emphatically that corporations are "middle-class."In an interview with Think Progress yesterday at the Ames, Iowa Republican debate, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul made a number of statements at odds with the reality that most of experience.

KEYES: What did you make of Mitt Romney’s statement today that “corporations are people”?

PAUL: Corporations are collections of people. I think we’re all corporations. To say we’re going to punish corporations like they’re someone else. All of us are corporations.

KEYES: Do you think that was basically in line with what he was saying?

PAUL: You think about, if you own a retirement fund, you have a 401k, everybody who has a 401k has parts of corporations, so in a sense we are.

KEYES: I think people might argue that corporations can’t be sent to jail.

PAUL: I think those arguments can be made, but I think the fact that a lot of times people want to vilify corporations, saying they’re someone else, that they’re these other rich people. They’re us. They’re the middle class. We all own parts of corporations.

I'm not sure I follow. Lots of people own homes and have bank accounts. Nobody would claim that "we are homes" or "we are banks". Nobody would claim that bankers are middle class just because middle class people put some of their money into a savings account or CD at a bank.When he ran for Senate in 2010, Paul reaped tens of thousands of dollars in donations from rightwing corporate funders like Koch Industries and hedge fund Mason Capital Management. It's not surprising that they would pour their money into his campaign, with views like this.